"Totally coup, yo."

I have a feeling that writing a weekly column about people saying and doing crazy things is going to get a lot easier now that it’s getting warmer. The heat seems to drive normal people nuts and sends the ones who were already a little off into Francis E Dec territory. At least that’s the explanation I gave myself when I tried to narrow down all the weird news stories to summarize this week. And that’s probably a self-serving explanation because the alternative – that this is part of a larger downward spiral into universal lunacy – is just too depressing.

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Under this plan, even gay Republicans like Bryan Fischer would be imprisoned.

LGBT activist preacher Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina has this plan, everyone! The point of it is to “get rid of all the lesbians and queers.” So non-queer lesbians, beware! Charles L Worley will “get rid” of you, too.

Stop me if you’ve heard of this “get rid of all the lesbians and queers” idea before. So we all build this huge fenced in area, right? We make sure the fences are electrified. And we put all the lesbians in there. I guess they would be transported by trains because, hey, we might as well. Then we build another huge fenced in area, and coral all the “queers and the homosexuals” in that one. It’s very important that we get both queers and homosexuals. Now they’re in separate fun ‘camps,’ of sorts, and they won’t be able to reproduce and get their Gay all over the next generation. So then “in a few years, they’ll die out,” according to Worley.

It’s hard to know even where to start with this one. At the risk of sounding like a non-homophobicAlex Jones, the Holocaust overtones are pretty ominous. It’s a good thing this guy has no power except over the minds of his deluded parishioners. Then you’ve got the idea lurking behind here that you need to separate the gay dudes from the gay ladies or else they will have sexytime with each other, which will lead to gay kids. And they’d do that because… Well, probably just to spite Baptists.

And then of course Worley seems to believe that as long as we build some North Korean prison camp for the gays and separate them from the rest of society, there won’t be any gay people anymore. It’s as if he really believes that guys are just convinced in to sticking their wangs up other dudes’ butts by persuasion. That really reveals the fragility of Worley’s own sexuality (I’m saying he’s definitely a closet case for those who can’t read between the lines).

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In the future, cyborgs will know what a tortoise is.

RT is a government-funded English language Russian news outlet. They have Alex Jones on from time to time but also broadcast a Thom Hartmann show. So it’s kind of like a mix between the old Soviet Pravda and the Huffington Post. There are a few diamonds in the rough, but there’s a lot of nonsense.

So it’s not very surprising that you’d find a story like this, which gives credence to the pipe dream of some Russian businessman with too much money who wants to inspire scientists to fulfill the more outlandish aspects of Singularity theory as predicted by Ray Kurzweil. The end result would be the construction of avatars – as in the movie Avatar – which can be used to store living human consciousnesses via some kind of digital upload.

The first step required to do this is to reverse engineer the brain. For an explanation for why even this one step is wildly implausible and maybe even not possible I’d recommend a series of detailed blog posts by PZ Myers on the subject which begins here. And that’s just the first step towards this goal. Of course it’s a bad idea to discourage advances in science and technology, but what RT and the subject of this report is suggesting just doesn’t jive with how science works. There are a lot more baby steps than there huge jumps.

So don’t get too excited. If you’re reading this any time close to when it gets posted, you’re probably going to die and won’t have to deal with the moral complexities of having your brain in a robot body.

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An immigrant, seen here, defiling American values.

The Eagle Forum is a real conservative organization and not a parody. They were founded by this woman named Phyllis Schlafly. You might recognize that last name because her son is the founder of Conservapedia, which is also definitely a serious thing and not a parody site despite what you will suspect if you choose to do serious scholarly research using Conservapedia.

So the Eagle Forum is upset about the recent NY Times article on how Honky McPalefaces now account for under 50% of US births. They complain that immigrants “do not share American values, so it is a good bet that they will not be voting Republican when they start voting in large numbers.” They also complained, incredibly, that immigrants have high rates of illiteracy. As if being illiterate ever stopped someone from voting Republican. Just a word of advice for the Eagle Forum: You really don’t want anyone looking into the correlations between illiteracy and conservatism.

Another really annoying part of this comment is the how casually conservatives will collapse “American values” with voting Republican, as if the two go together naturally. Maybe it’s time to start casually suggesting the opposite. If liberal pundits had the same kind of fortitude, they’d be tossing around statements about how the elections are about battles between Americans and Republicans and that if Americans aren’t careful the Republicans will take over. You won’t hear that on the Sunday morning shows though.

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Housefires may be the only way the Amish have to shave their beards.

Some Amish people are being obnoxious again. This time they’ve got bugs up their asses about smoke detectors. They had a similar issue recently when it came to putting the required orange stickers on the backs of their buggies. They had a victory in that instance in Kentucky, which passed a law exempting the Amish from using the same safety protocol by which everyone else has to abide.

It looks like they’re trying to do the same thing here in New York State when it comes to requirements that homes have smoke detectors installed. They refused to pay a fine, arguing that that would be a concession of NY State law’s supremacy over Yahweh Law.

What I honestly don’t understand is if they were to pay the fine, would that then allow them to continue living in these smoke detector-free houses? Because these guys seem to really not like smoke detectors. Like a lot.

“I use this,” he said pointing at his nose, “or him,” and his finger pointed upwards. “I don’t need a devil on the wall to tell me if my house is burning.”

Dude thinks smoke detectors are devils. Seriously. You can’t make this stuff up.

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An auction is selling vials of Ronald Reagan’s blood. At least, that’s what they say. I don’t know how it’s possible it’s taken this long for this to catch on. It seems like a natural fit. Reagan was one of them Hollyweirdos. He and Nancy were even into astrology and consulted an astrologer to plan their days. Seriously. You thought the Star Wars “defense” system and probable Alzheimer’s were bad? These people were getting advice from people who basically thought they could talk to planets.

So it makes perfect sense that we’d now be seeing this play out. For some reason Reagan’s son Michael is simultaneously both outraged and convinced that it could not be his father’s blood. He knows this because, I don’t know, Saturn is in its “third house” or something.

And besides, this is capitalism at work. What do these outraged conservatives want? Do they want a boycott, like those effete snobs who wouldn’t buy tuna for a few years? Do they want the government to intervene on this free market exchange? Look, if ReaganBlood (trademark pending, I’m sure) isn’t a product the public wants, then its price will deflate until the product is no longer viable. Any other approach is totally communism.

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Well that’s it for now. If my theory about the summer heat and news of this sort holds up, this column space should be getting even longer in the next few months. That or I’ll be in the throws of madness myself and will have to cover my own insanity and point out why I’m wrong. At that point I think this column would collapse into a black hole of meta. So we have that to look forward to.

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